Thursday, August 27, 2015

So You Say You Saw A Black Panther? Here’s Why I Don’t Believe You. ---Guest Post---

Black panthers have been part of modern lore in the United States
for more than 100 years, despite the lack of any compelling evidence of their
existence. As executive director of the Cougar Network, which is the only
research non-profit that studies cougar range expansion in North America, I am
frequently sent photos of misidentified felines and also often hear stories
about black panther sightings. So for exactly this reason, the Cougar Network
adheres to a scientifically rigorous standard to ensure that cougar observations
are legitimate. Specifically, we want to see photos, tracks, DNA evidence, or
video of the animals under consideration; we simply can’t accept sighting data
because it’s often unreliable. And this isn’t to say people aren’t seeing a
cougar when it’s reported to me – based on research I’ve done, we know they are
recolonizing the midwestern part of the U.S. – it’s just that we can’t verify
anything based on a story alone.

However, black panther sightings are a little different than
sightings of a regular old cougar – reporting something like a black panther is
more akin to reporting Big Foot or the Loch Ness monster – outside of the rare
instance of an escaped pet or a zoo animal, I’m quite skeptical. If black
panthers existed in the wild in the United States, we should at the very least
be seeing them killed on roads. For example, only one male (frequently
photographed) cougar inhabited a small area outside of LA until it was just
recently killed by a car. But we don’t see black panthers as road kill at all,
ever. For that reason alone, I maintain skepticism when I hear black panther
stories. But that’s not the only reason:

There is no
compelling evidence that a single wild “black panther” has ever existed in
United States.The largest cat in the United States, and in fact the fourth
largest cat in the world, is the mountain lion (Puma concolor) – also known as cougar, catamount, painter, and in
Florida, panther. Adult cougars are about 120-150 pounds, have tawny or brown
coats, and with the exception of the endangered Florida panther population and
a few solitary and long-distance travelers, live in the western part of the
country. Cougars have been hunted for centuries and are one of the best-studied
animals on the planet, yetthere has never
been a cougar documented displaying melanism. Melanism is a genetic
variation that results in excess pigmentation turning the coat entirely black,
and this variation just isn’t part of a cougar’s genetic make-up. So, you see,
there has never been such thing as a black mountain lion.

So, when most of us think about a black panther we’re
actually envisioning either a melanistic jaguar (which live in South America)
or a melanistic leopard (which live in Africa or Asia – think Bagheera from
“The Jungle Book”), both of which are huge cats with black coats. These are the
only animals that legitimately fit the “black panther” description and they simply
don’t live in the United States (it is true that jaguars are native to North America and a couple of individual animals may still be hanging on in extreme southwestern United States, but in modern history these animals were restricted to the southwestern extent of the country so we can’t use them to explain why people see Black Panthers). And any cat in the United States that’s even
close to being large enough to be confused with a leopard would be a cougar –
and they’re not black. So why are people
absolutely convinced that’s what they are seeing?

It turns out
perception isn’t entirely objective. In other words, your brain is messing
with you. Remember “The Dress”
– the viral phenomenon that hit social media earlier this year? This is a
perfect example of what I mean when I say perception isn’t objective. I can
almost guarantee if you talked about The Dress, you found at least one person
who saw an entirely different color than you did. That’s because the color you
see, as it turns out, depends on context. Some of us were primed to see the
dress in a daylight setting, making it look white with orange trim (that was
me!). Others could only see it as dark blue because their eyes were primed to
view it as being indoors or in a darker setting (the actual color of the dress
was blue). This Wired article
does a great job explaining this phenomenon. Similarly then, photographs of
animals in the trees, bushes, or shadows look a lot darker than they do when
they are in broad daylight; and sightings of “black panthers” early in the
morning or late in the evening are caused by the low lighting and shadows cast
at that time of the day. All this might seem obvious, but this simple fact is
more deceiving than you’d think. Our brains are quite good at tricking us into
seeing something we’re not. And if that’s the case, then what are these people seeing?

The story behind this picture is here. The house cat looks even bigger than it really is because it is closer to camera than the cougar, a camera trick called forced perspective.

Most often it’s house
cats. First of all, many of the photos I’ve seen are just too blurry to
confidently identify to species. But one thing I can’t stress enough about house
cats is how small they are in comparison to a cougar, which again is the only
cat in the U.S. remotely the same size as a leopard. To put it in perspective, if
a large house cat was measured at 12” at the shoulders, it wouldn’t even come
up to the top of most car tires, which are about 16” high. A cougar, on the
other hand, can be 30” high – putting its shoulders at about the height of the front
hood of that same car. They’re gigantic, and I genuinely think most folks
aren’t accustomed to the size difference; our search image – the way our brains
expect different items to look – just isn’t calibrated to seeing that big of a
cat. This might be why the majority of cougar reports I receive are from areas
where cougars haven’t lived for more than 100 years. Most people in those areas
(usually the eastern U.S.) haven’t ever seen a wild cougar (or jaguar or
leopard for that matter) and I think excitement rises when trail cameras or
fuzzy videos reveal a feline (even a large feline) in the woods.

So what do you do if
you’re convinced you saw something strange?My advice is always to stop and think for a second: does
what I just saw make sense? What else could it have been?
What is the most reasonable explanation? In science, that’s what we call
parsimony: the idea that we shouldn’t go looking for complex explanations when
a simple one will suffice.And if
a simple explanation won’t do the trick – on rare occasions it doesn’t – then
there must be mountains of corroborating evidence to back up the complex
explanation.

So if your neighbor’s cousin’s girlfriend’s dad swears up
and down he saw a black panther run across the yard out of the corner of his
eye at 5:30 last Thursday morning, think about it. Does that really make sense?
What else could have caught his attention out of the corner of his eye that
early in the morning? I’ll give you a hint: unless he lives in the Brazilian
Pantanal or the forests of India, it was not a black panther.

It was probably a house cat or a black lab.

Michelle LaRue is a research ecologist and public speaker at
the University of Minnesota, and is also the executive director of the Cougar Network, which is the only research
non-profit that focuses on cougar range expansion in North America. Michelle
focuses her own research on the spatial ecology of mammals and birds in many
ecosystems, including cougars, penguins,
seals, and polar bears. Her work has been covered by hundreds of international
media outlets such as the BBC, NBC Nightly News, Wall Street Journal, National
Geographic, and Scientific American.